Sailor who refused to deploy sentenced to hard labor

AP ^ | 5/12/5 | SETH HETTENA

[SmithL]

Much too light of a sentence.

[SmithL]

Tell the troops ping.

[meandog]

shave his ***** with a rusty razor ...oh, never mind.

[thoughtomator]

What's the average Joe get for this kind of infraction?

[RetiredArmy]

No Bad Conduct Discharge?????????????? This judge is a disgrace. All the military judges I knew in the Army would have pounded this guy in the sand. What a sad, sad day when a deserter can stay in the military and only do this light of a sentence. A total disgrace.

[Wolfie]

If only he was a pharmacist who refused to fill prescriptions. That's the kind of conscientious objector we like here.

[swmobuffalo]

Yeah, but I'd be willing to bet that at some point "retribution" will be meted out and he'll wish he'd kept his mouth shut and done his duty!

[stan the beaver]

Castrate the swine, then give him a BCD!!

[RetiredArmy]

That would only result in another sailor getting punished under the UCMJ. Not scum like this is worth losing your career over. Nope. He should have been jailed. He should have got the BCD. He did not want to deploy. He did not want to fight. So, give the @$$hole what he wanted, out of the Navy. Jail and a BCD would have been fine. I have seen soldiers get a BCD just for AWOL over 30 days. This guy missed movement to an overseas war zone. Jail and then the nail.

[ProudVet77]

If Marines are still running USN brigs, he's already had some retribution. After doing his hard labor, CNN will probably hire him as a military analyst.

[joebuck]

Wasn't Private Eddie Slovic executed for doing this same thing during WWII?

[sean327]

I cannot believe this is all this clown got. I don't know what all he was charged with, but at the very least he should have been charged with: Missing Movement, Disobedience of a Lawfull Order, Deriliction of Duty, and Conduct Unbecoming.

Had he been a Marine he would be in the Camp Pendleton Brig for a long time, making little rocks out of big ones!!!

[meatloaf]

It's not like the guy would be going house to house looking for terrorists or risking his ass traveling over roads with possible IED's. The guy's a loser.

I'm hoping he pulls the same crap again. We'll see how committed he is. Eventually he'll get a BCD. That will impress future employers.

[Dr.Zoidberg]

Agreed. Way to go your judgeshipfulness, encourage even more gutless cowards to refuse orders during time of war.

Sounds like a plan to me...

Dumb@$$

[DesignerChick]

What does hard labor entail these days?

[NavyCanDo]

What is this Bone-head doing in my Navy?

[pabianice]

Hold on. He still must serve the remained of his enlistment (as much as six years) as an E-1 leper. He'll spend these years on his hands and knees, pumping sewage and scraping every bilge aboard every ship in port. The pay for E-1 is $ 1,235/month, or, based upon the Navy 12 hour day, 6 days a week, about $ 4/hour. And he'll almost certainly get a General Discharge Under Other than Honorable Conditions. Wait til he tries to get his first civilian job...

[Laz711]

This is true. Even if he only has one year left on his enlistment, he isn't getting paid half of what he was getting paid (not to mention the loss of sea pay, and other benefits he may have), he will have the worst job in the Navy, working for a crusty BM1 or BMC that has nothing better to do with their time than to make his life miserable. I hope that after his hard labor, they send him to the worst possible place to serve, maybe on the Kitty Hawk scraping polishing the anchor just so they can drop it in the water and get it all nice and corroded again.

[Samurai_Jack]

[Captain Rhino]

Good question. Googled the MCM and came up with this for maximum punishments. (BTW "design" refers to deliberate, planned intent to miss the movement. "Neglect" refers to the more standard screw-up in getting back from liberty/pass.)

e. Maximum punishment.

(1) Design. Dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 2 years.

(2) Neglect. Bad-conduct discharge, forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and confinement for 1 year.

Possible that the discharge portion was just not reported or he was convicted of something besides missing a movement.